LETTER: Voting ruling disastrous

The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling to strike down key elements the Voting Rights Act is a disaster for America.

This ruling and the previous Citizens United ruling will effectively destroy our democracy. What we will effectively have is a dictatorship of the wealthiest and greediest Americans.

The Citizens United ruling negated a whole century of precedent and allowed multimillionaire CEOs to essentially buy the elections and promote their own purely selfish financial interests.

The recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act will embolden GOP governors and Republican state legislators to rig the outcome of elections by disenfranchising huge numbers of people who live in poor, black or Hispanic neighborhoods.

They already were doing this in several states, including Texas. Now they have the high court’s blessing to proceed full speed ahead.

Thanks to five U.S. Supreme Court justices, American industry will be free to deliberately ignore pollution, worker safety and the concerns of consumers as never before.

We will effectively have an “anything goes for the sake of the almighty dollar” society. We will see Social Security, Medicare and public education privatized out of existence. The wealthy few will have everything. Most everyone else will be dirt-poor.

Millions of Americans won’t accept the results of future elections as legitimate because too many voters were disenfranchised. Republicans, including Mike Huckabee, Greg Abbott, Tea Party spokesmen and various others misrepresent facts to defend measures whose only real purpose is to reduce voter turnout in neighborhoods expected to vote Democratic.

Voter suppression motivated by extreme partisanship is a much bigger issue than most any other issue.

The Voting Rights Act decision falls under the same general category as the Dred Scott decision. Both approved of something truly horrible.